On Jan. 11, 2025, hundreds of people gathered on the steps of Utah’s Capitol Building for the Rally for Public Lands—a show of support for preserving Utah’s national monuments, national forests and national park lands.

A light flurry of snow chilled the crowd as author Terry Tempest Williams, Utah Senate Minority Leader Luz Escamilla, Regina Lopez-Whiteskunk of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe and Latiné university student Louise Fernanadez spoke to the value of keeping public lands free of development, while underscoring what polling in Utah consistently states—that dismantling public land protections is overwhelmingly unpopular.

Among those speaking that day was Autumn Gillard, cultural resource manager for the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah, who emphasized the very specific value of public lands to her people. Gillard addressed how her cultural identity and physical health are intertwined with her ability to steward the landscape, to actively be a part of it. “Today I would like to express the importance of ancestral connection to public land,” she said. “Tribal people, long before the concept of public lands and forced colonization, interacted with the landscape traditionally, ceremonially as well as domestically,” Gillard said...

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